A blonde from Detroit (but a Tarheel at heart!) I've spent the last twelve years based in Beijing and traveling extensively through work all over China. Known mostly by my Chinese name Liu Suying (柳素英) I'm a woman of many masks. I've split my time between corporate work (most recently as the COO and Board Member of China's largest private construction company, China Pacific Construction Group) and my media work (via columns, my nationally syndicated radio show, regular news media appearances and filming movies). All of this I did while feeding my passion for theater and the arts with my Cheeky Monkey Theater troupe, and earning my MFA in Peking Opera. While out-drinking local officials at baijiu banquets (a rather pungent Chinese liquor) in 3rd tier cities is not a skill set one regularly would put on a resume, it has certainly helped provide me with an insight into Chinese business and government. And while Peking Opera is not a skill set that outwardly seems terribly practical, it has given me the tools to understanding Chinese culture from within and without. My previous work for the US Embassy in Beijing taught me the importance of communication, and as the Webmistress I have witnessed the evolution of the Chinese internet and been awed by its development. Follow on Weibo or on Twitter.

World Cup Hopes And History In China

One month after the Germanic victory at the 2014 World Cup, the topic of soccer has mostly fallen off the headlines in America (with the exception of Qatar’s 2022 slave-labor scandal), and yet in China the football phenomenon is still being hotly discussed. While the rest of the world continues on with their interim four years of local clubs and regional tournaments, China is still obsessing with the World Cup. As a leader in sports of the Olympic variety, China is staggeringly bad at soccer, and painfully aware of it.

One joke oft-repeated during discussions of the tournament is that the Chinese are happy that they didn’t make it into the World Cup, this way there was no pressure to win. Furthermore, the economic boon to China was in no way punitive, as you can see from this great infographic from the South China Morning Post, the Chinese presence in Brazil was no small feat. And while most forms of gambling are banned in the Mainland (to the extent where this correspondent was reprimanded for playing Rummy with some kids at a cafe in Beijing) the internet giants Tencent and Alibaba have brought in more than $600 million USD in bets before July even began.

And yet, despite these mighty accomplishments, China still feels a loss of face, perhaps in part due to the fact that they feel that they invented the game. Controversial (and lacking in any historical or factual basis) as it may be, FIFA declared years ago that the origins of soccer are in China. While contemporary soccer is actually based on a Cambridge-rules originating in the United Kingdom, the traditional cuju game was similar in that it involved kicking a ball, but it is more closely related to modern hackysack than anything else. But one can’t blame FIFA too much, they’re clearly courting fans who don’t have any home teams to really root for, so they had to make extra effort.

Recently, this correspondent was a special guest for a China Central Television program focusing on cuju and its history, you can watch the episode here. The cuju expert, a Mr. Mei Yi whose day job at the Shenzhen exchange did not unfortunately allow for any actual cuju training time, pointed out that ancient China was certainly more forward thinking than modern-day FIFA, as men and women could both play the game together. Also, I’m fairly certain that there was no crying allowed on the cuju field.

“One Hundred Children in the Long Spring” (长春百子图), a painting by Chinese artist Su Hanchen (苏汉臣, active 1130-1160s AD) of the Song Dynasty period. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So whether or not China will get the world cup isn’t a question of “if” but rather a question of “when” as the financial gains for both China and FIFA are too high to look away. But whether or not China will have a team worthy of participation, thats a larger question for the experts to analyze. This correspondent, however, is happy to enjoy football in the form of Cuju, the hutong sports bar in Beijing.

As an expatriate American, I feel that I have the right to use the words soccer and football interchangeably, and while this probably confuses some readers, its a nice little reminder of how weird us Yanks are for calling it soccer in the first place.

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